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Evernote for Windows 8 Is Here

Posted by on 25 Oct 2012

Posted by on 25 Oct 2012

Here at Evernote, we’ve been big supporters of the evolution of the Windows platform in recent years. Their innovative interface direction for Windows Phone inspired us to completely rethink the Evernote experience. Now, we’re excited to announce the availability of Evernote for Windows 8, our beautiful, simplified new application that’s focused on providing a great touch and reading experience for Windows 8 devices. It’s the perfect companion to the robust functionality of Evernote for Windows Desktop. Let’s take a look.

The Design

Evernote for Windows 8 fully embraces the great design aesthetic of the operating system, which makes the app feel incredibly light and responsive. The note list is made up of large, bright tiles. We’ve implemented all of the swipe gestures that allow you to navigate and interact with the app. You can even go into Split Screen mode to view Evernote and your browser, Skitch or other apps side by side.

Swipe Gestures

Windows 8 has a number of powerful swipe gestures that allow you to do more with the application:

Semantic zoom: Pinch out of the note list and tag list to see a high-level alphabetical or chronological organization. Then tap to jump to the grouping you want.

App Bar and Nav Bar: Swipe from the top or bottom to bring up the App and Nav Bars. The Nav Bar lets you navigate to different parts of the app. The App Bar lets you create notes, sync and perform other actions.

Charm Bar: Swipe from the right to bring up the Charm Bar, which lets you search, share and view settings.

Snap View: Swipe slowly from the left to allow Evernote to share the screen with another application.

Swipe on objects: Tap and tug down on tiles or tags in your note list to select multiple notes at once.

Interacting with Notes

Evernote for Windows 8 lets you find the notes you’re looking for by browsing through notebooks, scanning your note list or searching. Once you find what you’re looking for, the app gives you a beautiful layout, perfect for viewing your content.

To create a new note, tap on New Note in the App Bar. When creating or viewing a note, you can use the side bar to assign it to a notebook or give it a tag. You can also append text to the end of an existing note by tapping on the Edit icon. Add text to a note by clicking the edit icon. Please note that the app does not support rich text editing at this time. You won’t be able to edit notes containing text styles, embedded images, etc., but you will be able to append text to them. We plan to add that capability soon.

Notebooks and Tags

In Evernote for Windows 8, the Notebooks and Tags views allow you to easily view and find the notes you need.

The Notebook View
The Notebook View displays your notebooks however you like. You can view your list fully expanded or collapsed into Stacks. You can collapse or expand the list from the Charm Bar. We also indicate which of your notebooks are shared by displaying an icon inside of Shared Notebooks. Use the Semantic Zoom feature to zoom out of the notebook list to go directly to the items you want. The App Bar also lets you add a new notebook, if you’d like.

The Tag View
If you rely on tags to organize your notes, then you’ll love the Tag list in Evernote for Windows 8. For the basic use case, you can tap on a tag, then view the associated notes. For more precise results, notice that when you tap and tug on a tag to select it, certain other tags in the list grey out, while others don’t. The tags that stay visible are the ones that you’ve used together with the selected tag. Now, if you tap on a second tag, you’ll be able to quickly jump to a list of notes that are tagged with both.

Getting Started Guide

If you have questions about Evernote for Windows 8, we have answers. Check out our Getting Started Guide for an overview of the new app.

More to Come

There’s a lot more coming to Evernote for Window 8. Our simplified version of Evernote for touch interfaces is going to get lots of great new features and capabilities. We hope you like Evernote for Windows 8. Let us know what you think.

Quick question: if I install both the Win8 and the desktop versions, is the notes database created twice on my hard drive or is it shared across both versions? Thanks.

Trejkaz—

Did you forget to add ink note support? The app is pretty much useless without it as almost all my notes are ink notes. Read only access is kind of sub-par. You do know Windows 8 is supposed to make tablet PCs more useful, right? Not less useful. Try again.

Martijn—

Can I also access shared notebooks from the app? I have not been able to find them yet. Otherwise the app looks great!

Brandon—

Do you recommend having the Evernote App only, or the Evernote App, and the Desktop version of Evernote? Thank you!!

Amber—

I would really love it if you could add “copy note link” to that app. I like to use it to link certain notes to other notes.

Me—

Sorry but Metro Evernote is really crappy – half of the screen is just a wasted empty space.
You can only see few notes.
Completely unusable…. 🙁

Rob—

This thing might look ok, but functionally is useless.

Sorting is terrible, and why can’t quickly move notes between notebooks and add tags right from the main view.

Bad.

james—

Just started using this on my new surface tablet. Sync either fails or crashes the app. I have uninstalled and reinstalled but no change. I Can’t use it at all. Renders my surface tablet petty useless actually 🙂

any thoughts Mr Evernote?
JP

David Rogers (@David_Rogers)—

You say that in Evernote for Windows 8:
“You won’t be able to edit notes containing text styles, embedded images, etc., but you will be able to append text to them. We plan to add that capability soon.”

Is that capability also going to be added for iOS or for Android?

I’m a heavy Evernote user, currently using an iPad as my tablet. I find it extremely limiting that I am unable to fully edit an existing note on my iPad, except by going through the browser (not the app!). I have been unclear if this limitation is due to iOS restrictions, or what, but now it seems it will be a limit in the first version of the Windows 8 app too.

P.S. If not, you may drive me to Windows tablet, if you do add that functionality to your Windows 8 app!

Adrian James—

Just downloaded the Windows 8 app on our shop PC, frankly it’s awful, (as in terrible, not as in full of awe!). Its so ugly, just displaying snippets (most of our notes are text), which scroll the wrong way, I want lists, including tags and notebooks on one screen (Or separate on screen windows, perhaps MS should rename this “8” as it seems to have little to do with Windows)The PC is not “touch” and most business PCs will not be for years (if ever!). My colleagues have a wonderful new Evernote on iOS, I want this on Android (and perhaps windows (if we stick with it)) You seem to have fallen for Microsofts “minimalist” style hype.

Marco—

I like the way the new Evernote for Windows 8 looks, but I’m going to remove it anyway – it’s just not user friendly (without a touchscreen). Like: I can’t get the menu to show and moving from the titel to the tekst with the TAB key doesn’t seem to work – and I don’t like to use my mouse for every action.

Allen—

Will a nice looking Evernote desktop client ever be available for PC? I’ll probably never buy a Win 8 tablet and, based on my experience with Win 8’s “metro,” it’ll be years before that’s well-integrated into a PC desktop environment. Will development continue on the Windows desktop client?

I’m a daily, heavy Evernote user and am (for better or worse) now dependent upon Evernote for my daily work. Nonetheless, the desktop client needs more work in both interface design and functionality. It’s important for me to know if the Evernote desktop client will continue to be developed.

Thanks,
@

Suhayb Hafiz—

I hope you guys are planning on integrating wacom pen capabilities into the windows 8 app. That would be awesome.

John—

Unless I’m missing something, the most important functionality for me is completely missing from the Win 8 app…SHARING. For Pete’s sake why is there no way to share the notes I’ve created? Ever heard of something called “collaboration”? This basically reduces the app to a repository. Now I’m forced to have the web version open alongside the app just so I can share a note I created. Which begs the question: Why even use the app?!

Can someone please tell me how this was overlooked? I sometimes wonder if the developers even USE the app they are developing. wth.

Drew Anderson—

I am frustrated with the Metro app on my PC. Maybe it’s better with a touch screen. PLEASE add the capability to install a desktop version of the app on windows 8. I use windows 8 as my admin computer and rely on evernote constantly. So for now I have to use evernote on a windows 7 virtual machine.

Drew Anderson—

I was able to install evernote on the windows 8 desktop. Ignore my last comment.

Harshit Singhal—

I have been using Evernote for my everyday tasks for a while now and it helps me greatly in keeping my work organized. There are very few alternatives to it, if any, in my opinion.

For business reasons i switch daily from iOS to Android, to Windows 8 RT and even if I really appreciate Evernote to be available on Windows 8 RT it is still a very poor version compare to the others…

Please give us more details about the “More to Come”, It’s Chrismast time… 😉

Tobias W.—

Hi, I am a premium user and I’m using Evernote on my Mac, my iPhone, my Windows 8 PC and now also on my Windows RT Surface device. The only native Evernote client for the Surface is this new Windows 8 app. While I welcome this additional client as it shows commitment to every platform, the implementation lacks.

Actually, let me rephrase this: the implementation sucks.

The grid layout for this app wastes a lot of screen real estate. Only a handful of notes fit the screen at a time and note titles are truncated because of the square format of the notes in the grid. This is useless. You already know how to create an app with little screen real estate: the iOS app works perfectly fine, why screw up the user experience on a device so much when you have so much screen real estate on a Surface?!

Also, the app is instable. It crashes ALL THE TIME on my Surface. You probably didn’t test the app very much before releasing it. In its current state, it’s useless just because it’s so unstable. I cannot even write a plain text note with more than a couple of sentences and the app crashes.

Other reasons the app is mostly useless is the lack of features. It only allows to put it clear text notes without any extras. Windows 8 is a powerful platform and runs on PCs and a Surface tablet that is more PC than tablet by design. Why don’t you use it that way?

At this point, you need to do two things:

1. Throw away the current Windows 8 app. The design choices cannot be salvaged, it has to be redone. Start from scratch and do it right the next time.

2. Make the Desktop application available as a build for ARM so it runs on the Surface.

Just one thing to consider: Evernote is not the only note taking application in the cloud on Windows 8. Microsoft has been improving OneNote and it’s available on more than just Windows now. If Evernote doesn’t manage to improve its support of Windows 8, it will lose customers to OneNote pretty fast. I’d rather stay with Evernote, so please invest in Windows 8. Many thanks!

Jack Thorogood—

I’d love to be able to use Evernote on my Surface RT; indeed its the closest thing that might make the otherwise worthless device useful but…. it crashes all the time. Despite removing and reinstalling evernote a few times it is to no avail. I’ve never got past the initial sync process.
Surely evernote you can sort this out? Please?

Norbert—

it´s just completly confusing within windows 8. we hope very much that there are in trge near future no more tiles.

Realitista—

Needs stylus/ink support badly. I had to switch to Onenote despite having all my other notes in evernote.

Matt—

Not to pile on, but this is worth dropping Evernote all together over. I just spent two hours trying to keep it from crashing (after reinstalling it twice) on the Metro Side, and then opening it up on the desktop side it’s hardly usable. No pen support either. Looks great, sure, but I definitely regret paying for Premium now. It comes across that app development is half-baked at best, especially compared to their iPad version.

Yusuke—

Please add ink support

Adam—

This version of the app makes me sad. I traded my iPad for a Surface and was EXTREMELY let down in the transition. Now I’m lugging my laptop around and regretting letting the iPad go. Tempted to look at Onenote for Windows 8.1 now.

Brian—

Any plans to update this? Really looking for some features that would make the experience similar to android and ios

William Peters—

Windows 8 is almost gone and Windows 10 with Edge is here. I’m anxiously awaiting an Evernote update so I can clip from Edge, Hurry! Hurry!